Rasionalism is a philosophical doctrine
to signify that reason is the most vital thing in order to attain a knowldege.
Empiricists claim that knowledge is attained through nature with the empirical
objects, then rationalists claim that knowledge is attained from reasoning. The
reasoning instruments consist of logical principles and logic principles.
The debate
around which the rationalism/empiricism distinction
revolves is one of the oldest and most continuous in philosophy. Some of Plato's
most explicit arguments address the topic and it was arguably the central
concern of many of the Modern thinkers. Indeed, Kant's principal works
were concerned with "pure" faculties of reason. Contemporary
philosophers have advanced and refined the issue, though there are current
thinkers who align themselves with either side of the tradition.
It is difficult
to identify a major figure in the history to whom some rationalist doctrine has not been
attributed at some point. One reason for this is that there is no question that
humans possess some sort of reasoning ability that allows them to come to know
some facts they otherwise wouldn't (for instance, mathematical facts), and
every philosopher has had to acknowledge this fact. Another reason is that the
very business of philosophy is to achieve knowledge by using the rational
faculties, in contrast to, for instance, mystical approaches to knowledge.
Nevertheless, some philosophical figures stand out as attributing even greater
significance to reasoning abilities. Three are discussed here: Plato, Descartes,
and Kant.
Rationalists argued that like mathematics,
philosophy and science can determine absolute universal principles, and then
from these proceed to additional truths that will be absolute and universal.
Consider one of Descartes’ central examples which he uses to support
Rationalism: two plus three equals
five. If I know this, and also that five plus six equals eleven,
then I can put the two together to reason that two plus three (which is five)
plus six equals eleven. I can do this regardless of and prior to
experiences with sets of two, three or six things. Empiricists would
agree that “two plus three equals five” is a useful understanding, but that it
is true given that we continue to experience it as true, not because reason
determines it to be true regardless of experience. Empiricists argued that, unlike simple
arithmetic, philosophy and science are complex and contingent, dependent on
time and place, and so cannot prove understandings to be absolute or
universal.
Plato
The most famous
metaphysical doctrine of the great Greek philosopher Plato is
his doctrine of "Forms," as espoused in The Republic and
other dialogues. The Forms are described as being outside of the world as
experience by the senses, but as somehow constituting the metaphysical basis of
the world. Exactly how they fulfill this function is generally only gestured at
through analogies, though the Timaeus describes the Forms as
operating as blueprints for the craftsman of the universe.
The
distinctiveness of Plato's rationalism lies in another aspect of his theory of
Forms. Though the common sense position is that the senses are one's best means
of getting in touch with reality, Plato held that human reasoning ability was
the one thing that allowed people to approach the Forms, the most fundamental
aspects of reality. It is worth pausing to reflect on how radical this idea is:
On such a view, philosophical attempts to understand the nature of
"good" or "just" are not mere analyses of concepts formed,
but rather explorations of eternal things that are responsible for shaping the
reality of the sensory world.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Known as the
first great modern European philosopher, wrote the first canonical modern
European philosophy texts, his Discourse on Method and his Meditations. He
is also known in mathematics for the Cartesian coordinate system (X and Y as
two dimensions), a device useful for visually displaying algebraic equations
and critical for the later European development of calculus by Newton and
Leibniz. The word Cartesian is used, rather than Decartesian,
to refer to things that are of or like Descartes, such as his coordinate system
and his dualism between body and mind.
Descartes was
born in Touraine, France, a town which has since been renamed Descartes after
its most famous citizen. Descartes’ father was a member of parliament,
though his mother died when he was very young. He went to law school to
follow his father and become a merchant, but decided to become a mercenary
instead and fight in the 30 Years War “to seek truth“, in his words.
It seems that he did not find truth in law school. As a soldier, he
had much time waiting for battle, and studied mathematics and science in his
spare time. On the night of November 10th, 1619, Descartes had a series
of visions that convinced him that the world is a rational and mechanical
system profoundly in tune with the rationality of the human mind. Note
that, before Europe received much of basic mechanics from China and algebra
from Muslims, Descartes would have little reason to view nature as a
mathematical machine.
At first,
Descartes intended on writing a book on physics, his Treatise on the
World, but in 1633 Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for his
solar-centric theor, that the earth moves around the sun, a theory found
earlier in India and Islamic lands that mistakenly posits the sun at the center
of the universe instead of the earth. Because of Galileo’s troubles,
Descartes decided to publish his Discourse on Method instead,
and it is today considered the first major work of modern European philosophy.
This caution did
not spare Descartes however, as the work was condemned by the Pope in 1663,
thirty years after Galileo’s work was condemned and after Descartes’ death, and
it was put on the prohibited index of books alongside many others that are
foundational for the European Enlightenment. Even though Descartes, like
Aquinas, argued that reason teaches us that the Catholic Church is the one true
religion, his heresy was teaching that it is reason that shows us this, not the
authority of the Church or its connection to objectivity itself.
Descartes remained a practicing Catholic until his death.
As the skeptical
philosopher of science Feyerabend notes, the Church did not merely stand for
ignorance, but supported the philosophers and scientists whose work did not
conflict with its dogmas, as do institutions in general. As far as the
Church was concerned, it was the work of Descartes and Galileo that was in
conflict with reason and experience already acquired, matters of debate for
centuries between philosophers and theologians within the institution. If
one assumes that the Bible is an authentic record of human experience, and if
it appeals to human reason in telling everyone to seek the light and be
critical of humanity, it is not difficult to assume that Descartes and Galileo
are in contradiction with the science of their day, supported by the institution
of the Church, the highest science of the time being theology.
Descartes’ death
is famous and unfortunately funny. For the majority of his life, he
worked in bed until noon each day, an aristocrat who had the time and leisure
to do this. After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the
Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to
Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately for Descartes, she
wanted lessons each and every morning at five o’clock. Between the snow
and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and died.
Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in
bed. This is similar to Sir Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching
pneumonia after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the
meat and keep it from rotting. Some Swedes reported that Descartes was
killed with a poisoned communion wafer given to him by a priest but the sources
on this are questionable and it is likely this story was invented by Swedish
protestants.
Descartes’
philosophical writings, particularly the Meditations, drew the reactions
of several philosophers who themselves went on to become famous, particularly
Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, and Locke. In the Meditations, Descartes
asks: What we can know for certain if it is possible that everything is
an illusion of the mind? Like Avicenna, Descartes concludes that we
can be certain that we are aware and conscious. From this, he proceeds to
conclude that we can be certain that our thoughts are our own, that the world
is real, that there are things in the world that we can know for certain, and
that there is a good and loving monotheistic god who would not deceive us about
these things. Some philosophers agreed with this very much, but did not
find Descartes’ argument convincing and tried to come up with more satisfying
proofs. Other philosophers who were more skeptical, such as the Empiricists
Hume, did not buy it and argued that human certainty is always an assumption.
The two sides of the debate became known as Rationalism and Empiricism.
In a world of
increasing algebra and mechanics, Descartes turns from an ancient understanding
of causes up in the heavens above, acquired through centuries of charting the
stars and the seasons, to an understanding of causes in the mechanics of this
world below. While Descartes argued that a monotheistic god clearly
created the world, as reason tells us all things have causes, he was condemned
like Hobbes, Newton and others for arguing that nature works like a machine,
and once caused proceeds largely on its own. Descartes argued that the
natural world, including animals and human bodies, are mechanical and
unconscious, like a mechanical clock and unlike a human mind, and that the
human mind and body are exclusively separate, a position known as Cartesian
dualism. The worst consequence of this was that Descartes
practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while still alive to learn about
anatomy, and argued that animals do not have minds, feel nothing, and merely
appear to behave as if in pain. In one place, he even argued that the
mistaken belief that animals can have conscious sensations is one of the worst
obstacles to the progress of science and rationality.
Baruch
Spinoza
Was born in the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, and was
thus Jewish, Portuguese, and Dutch. Jews had fled from Spain and Portugal
to nearby lands during the Spanish Inquisition of 1492 and the Portuguese
Inquisition of 1536. If 1492 is a familiar date, that is because it is
the year that Christians retook Spain from Muslims, and also the year Columbus
chose to leave Spain and sail as far across the world as he could. While
Jews thrived in Spain and Portugal under Islamic rule, often occupying high
places in the government, education, science and medicine, the Christians had
not yet learned to be tolerant or multicultural. The Portuguese
Inquisition that caused Spinoza’s own Jewish community to flee to Amsterdam
happened only a hundred years before his birth. Some scholars argue that
the Portuguese Spinoza family was originally of the Spanish Espinosa family,
some of whom fled to Portugal to avoid the Spanish Inquisition while others
remained in Spain and converted to Catholicism. If this is true,
Spinoza’s family successfully fled both inquisitions.
Spinoza was not
only a philosopher, but also a scientist, mathematician, and biblical scholar,
studying the bible critically to understand and interpret it’s authorship,
meaning, and historical context. Spinoza’s views of the bible and its
authorship, radical for the time, got him kicked out of the Jewish community at
the age of 23, as well as ostracized by the surrounding Christian community of
Amsterdam. Like Descartes, his work was put on the Catholic Index
of Forbidden Books. He was once attacked as he left the synagog by a
man with a knife who yelled out, “Heretic!”, and Spinoza wore his cloak,
torn by the knife, for years afterwards as a badge of honor.
Spinoza was one of the first European biblical scholars to question the
traditional understanding that the first five books of the Old
Testament (for Jews the Torah, the only testament) were
not written by Moses. At the time, they were still known as the five Books
of Moses, until Spinoza and others pointed out that not only did the book
of Exodus speak about Moses in the third person, but Moses dies near the end,
making his authorship of the book quite questionable. Islamic scholars
had noted this problem of authorship centuries earlier.
After being
banished from Amsterdam for a brief period and then returning, Spinoza lived as
a lens grinder, making lenses for telescopes and microscopes, turning down
several teaching positions for a quiet and private life. Because Spinoza
died at the relatively young age of forty four from an unknown lung condition,
it is suspected that his death was in part caused by glass dust inhaled while
grinding. He was known as an outstanding producer of lenses, and these
were used by scientists in the fields of optics, astronomy and medicine during
the European enlightenment as they had been used in earlier forms by Muslims.
After writing
several short works on science, theology, and philosophy, particularly
criticism of the work of Descartes, Spinoza wrote his masterpiece, the Ethics,
which was only published after his death and written in Latin, as was most
European scholarship for centuries. Leibniz, who we will examine next,
visited Spinoza and discussed his as yet unpublished Ethics with
him. Then, after returning to Germany, Leibniz plagiarized parts of the
work and published them interspersed with his own without giving Spinoza
credit. There are many instances in philosophy, both ancient and modern,
of duplicated work that dances on the boundary between illegitimate plagiarism
and legitimate influence. Philosophers often fail to mention names when
using ideas in the sequence of an argument.
Although Spinoza
was interested in investigation and observation of the sciences, he was drawn
to Rationalism via philosophy and mathematics. His Ethics is
an attempt to do philosophy as a formal Euclidean geometric proof.
Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician proceeded from assumptions and
principles to deduce conclusions that necessarily follow. While Euclid did
not have equations, he worked systematically much in the way that mathematical
and logical proofs work, and Spinoza attempted to follow Euclid’s method to
make his thinking rigorous and sound. This is why he is known as a
Rationalist, falling under the same heading as Descartes.
Central to the
work, Spinoza attacked Cartesian dualism and argued that mind and body are
inclusively one, not exclusively two, an anti-dualist position known as monism. In ancient Indian,
Greek and Chinese philosophy, the idea that all things are one beneath and
beyond human judgement is known as philosophical monism. For
Spinoza, there is only one unified reality, which he identified with God as Being,
and any complete difference or exclusive separation is human ignorance and
misunderstanding. Each individual
thing, including minds, are like a wave on the sea.
According to
Spinoza, nature, the world and all of Being is God, a pantheist position that
infuriated the traditionally religious and got Spinoza barred as a heretic by
both Jews and Christians of Amsterdam, who believed God to be separate from and
superior to the physical world. Just as the Gnostic notion of a world
ruled by Satan, removing God from the world entirely, was deemed heretical to
the orthodox, the opposite pantheist view, that the world is identical to God,
was deemed likewise heretical. According to the Jewish and Christian
orthodox position, God rules the world as its separate superior. In the
same vein, right wing evangelical Christians in America today have taken to
attacking the environmental movement as satanically inspired pantheism, a
heretical worship of nature rather than of a god that created nature but is
separate and distinct from it.
Spinoza argued
against the immortality of the soul, which helped to label him a heretic.
Like Jains and Buddhists of India, Spinoza believed that the self ceases to be
a separate individual thing at death, but, insofar as one has come to identify
with and know the whole as oneself in life, one lives on as the whole
itself. Unlike Jains and Buddhists, Spinoza did not believe in stages of
reincarnation. In an early episode of the Simpsons, Bart
sells his soul but then regrets the decision and spends a day and night
tracking it down. His sister Lisa tells him that some philosophers
believe one is not born with a soul, but earns one, as he did. The
writers are likely thinking of Spinoza.
Spinoza believed
that reality is one substance with all particular beings linked together by
chains of causation. Spinoza was a determinist, and believed
that there was no real freedom or chance in the universe. The will and
mind of God was not the personal care of an emotional being with a personality,
but the causal workings and design of nature. Reason reveals the
necessary causal connections between things. Spinoza argued that human
beings, like Descartes, believe in free will because they are aware of desires
but do not understand the reasons behind these desires, and so they perceive
the gap as freedom when in fact there is none. Spinoza noted that people
who are driven by passions, such as the baby seeking the breast, the cruel boy
who lashes out at others, and the drunk who seeks more to drink, all feel that
they are free because they do not understand the forces that determine their
actions.
Just because
there is no free will does not mean that human beings have no degree of control
over their actions. Understanding the causes of one’s behavior and
situation with reason gives one greater ability to act in various ways. If one has a greater exercise of reason, one
will naturally be determined to take a better path that one may not have been
aware of before. An individual who knows they are hungry is free
to eat a sandwich rather than punch random people or burst into tears, but the
past entirely determines whether the individual will choose to make a sandwich
or not. In this sense, one gains freedom by reason, but much as
immortality is not immortality for the individual but the individual conforming
to nature, so too is freedom not freedom for the individual but the individual
conforming to nature, becoming more capable.
Scholars have
noted that this is similar to Daoism of ancient China and Stoicism of ancient
Greece and Rome. As we become more active, we become the universe, the
sum of all activity. Like the Mutazilites of Islam, who believed that God
is reason and the necessary logic of all being, Spinoza was committed to the
position that God is not free to be illogical or be contradictory, but as the
sum of all activity this absolutely determined being is the sum of all freedom.
Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716 CE)
Was a German philosopher and mathematician who, as mentioned, invented calculus
at the same time as Newton and we still use his system of notation. His
first job was as an alchemist’s assistant, then he became a lawyer’s assistant.
As also mentioned, he met Spinoza, and though the two disagreed on much,
Leibniz is known to have borrowed, possibly plagiarized, parts of Spinoza’s
Ethics. Leibniz published little during his lifetime, and to this day no
definitive collection exists of his various and disparate writings. His
most famous writings are his Monadology and his Discourse
on Metaphysics.
Leibniz invented the binary
system still used by computers today, which may or may not give way
to something else like quantum computers in the near future. Leibniz was
a sinophile (one who loves Chinese culture), studied Chinese
thought, at least that which was available to him, and invented his binary
system inspired in part by the Yi Jing divination system, the ancient Chinese
binary divination system that represents all possible situations with solid and
broken lines just as Leibniz’s binary system represents all numbers with ones
and zeros. Leibniz was communicating with Christian missionaries in
China, and he, like some of the missionaries, believed that Europeans could learn
much from Confucianism that was in line with Christianity. Also an
admirer of the Chinese abacus, Leibniz was one of the most important innovators
of the mechanical calculator,
an early computer which employed his binary system.
Like Descartes
and Spinoza, Leibniz believed that God created the world as a rational,
mechanical apparatus. Because of this, Leibniz famously argued that this is the best
of all possible worlds. As God is omniscient, God was aware of all
possible worlds before creation, and chose this to be the created world, so it
must therefore be the best. Of course, many who ponder the problem of
evil, the theological problem debated for centuries about how suffering in a
rational world is possible, would question this assertion. Like Spinoza,
Leibniz tried to come up with pure deductive understanding of the world.
Unfortunately this meant the world was very unlike how we experience it.
The infinite,
the eternal, is for the mathematician Leibniz an infinite series of distinct
points, not a unity beyond all division as it is for Spinoza. These are
the elementary particles of the universe, eternal and indivisible, like the
atoms (“without cut”) of the ancient Indian and Greek atomists. Unlike
the ancient Indian and Greek atoms, however, Leibniz’s points are individual
minds he calls monads. This infinite plurality is entirely made of mind,
yet they are many exclusively as opposed to Spinoza’s anti-dualist monistic
God-mind. It seems as if the minds perceive each other imperfectly, but
in actuality they do not interact. Each is its entire universe. In
what Leibniz calls a pre-established harmony, each monad was set apart from the
central monad, God, and when the monads split and became individuals, they were
set in motion such that they could all run independently but seem to share a
universe and interact. Space, matter and motion are subjective phenomena,
not objectively real. Notice how this follows Descartes insofar as all
can be doubted other than mind, and that mathematics is given as true by virtue
of the essentially quantitative nature of being.
While there are
similarities to Descartes, it is also similar to Berkeley the idealist, who
thinks reality is God’s dream, and we are dreams within the dream, except in
this case, we are each having God’s dream, but separate from God and each
other, each privately having the same dream but not contained within a single
dream. Rather, each dreamer is derived from the original dream, each an
individual dubbed copy. Notice that for Spinoza and Berkeley, there is an
underlying identity with God which allows the individual be eternal, while in
Leibniz, it is the underlying complete separation that allows the individual to
be eternal, unlike any substance, which is an illusion, but like the original
mama Monad, and like the infinite nature of the endless series of numerals (1,
2, 3…). It is also similar to Indra’s net of the Indian tradition, a net
of mirrors that all reflect each other, a metaphor that Leibniz uses without
referring to India or Indra.
There are
several principles Leibniz draws upon again and again. One is the Principle of Identity, also known as the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): If a statement is true, then its negation is
false, and if a statement is false, then its negation is true. For
example, if the statement, “Leibniz is a logician” is true, then the statement,
“Leibniz is not a logician” is false, and vice versa. Kant and Russell,
advocates of logic and the principle of noncontradiction, studied the work of
Leibniz intensely, advocating this principle. In contrast, Hegel argued
in his Logic that all things work by way of contradiction, of tension between
opposites.
Another central
principle of Leibniz’s is the Identity
of Indiscernibles: If two
things are without any discernable difference, then they must be not two
things, but identical, the same single thing. Of course, if two
things are in different locations or exist at different times, this is a
discernable difference.
A third
principle of Leibniz’s is the Principle
of Sufficient Reason: If
something exists, there must be a reason why it exists the way it does.
Leibniz, a Rationalist, believes that the world was rationally created by God,
who controls all in this best and most rational of all possible worlds, and so
he assumes that each thing can be rationally explained because each thing was
rationally created.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804 CE)
In some
respects, the German philosophy Immanuel Kant is
the paradigm of an anti-rationalist philosopher. A major
portion of his central work, the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, is
specifically devoted to attacking rationalist claims to have insight through
reason alone into the nature of the soul, the spatiotemporal/causal structure
of the universe, and the existence of God. Plato and Descartes are among his
most obvious targets.
For instance, in
his evaluation of rationalist claims concerning the nature of the soul (the
chapter of the Critique entitled "The Paralogisms of Pure
Reason"), Kant attempts to diagnose how a philosopher like Descartes could
have been tempted into thinking that he could accomplish deep insight into his
own nature by thought alone. One of Descartes' conclusions was that his mind,
unlike his body, was utterly simple and so lacked parts. Kant claimed that
Descartes mistook a simple experience (the thought, "I think") for an
experience of simplicity. In other words, he saw Descartes as introspecting,
being unable to find any divisions within himself, and thereby concluding that
he lacked any such divisions and so was simple. But the reason he was unable to
find divisions, in Kant's view, was that by mere thought alone we are unable to
find anything.
At the same
time, however, Kant was an uncompromising advocate of some key rationalist
intuitions. Confronted with the Scottish philosopher David Hume's claim
that the concept of "cause" was merely one of the constant
conjunction of resembling entities, Kant insisted that all Hume really
accomplished was in proving that the concept of causation could not possibly
have its origin in human senses. What the senses cannot provide, Kant claimed,
is any notion of necessity, yet a crucial part of our concept of causation is
that it is the necessary connection of two entities or events.
Kant's conclusion was that this concept, and others like it, must be a
precondition of sensory experience itself.
In his moral
philosophy (most famously expounded in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), Kant made an even
more original claim on behalf of reason. The sensory world, in his view, was
merely ideal, in that the spatiotemporal/sensory features of the objects people
experience have their being only in humanity's representations, and so are not
features of the objects in themselves. But this means that most everyday
concepts are simply inadequate for forming any notion whatsoever of what the
world is like apart from our subjective features. By contrast, Kant claimed
that there was no parallel reason for thinking that objects in themselves
(which include our soul) do not conform to the most basic concepts of our
higher faculties. So while those faculties are unable to provide any sort of
direct, reliable access to the basic features of reality as envisioned by Plato
and Descartes, they and they alone give one the means to at least contemplate
what true reality might be like.
References
- Bonjour, L. 1997. In Defense of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. ISBN 0521597455
- Carruthers, P. 1992. Human Knowledge and Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0198751028
- Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
- Descartes, René. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (eds.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052128807X
- Kant, Immanuel. 1969. Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp Smith, trans. Bedford
Books. ISBN 0312450109
- Kant, Immanuel, 1998. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Mary Gregor,
trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521626951
- Markie, Peter. 2005. "Rationalism and Empiricism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved
September 20, 2007.
- Plato. 1997. Complete Works. John Cooper, ed. Indianapolis: Hackett
Press. ISBN 0872203492
- https://newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Rationalism
- https://ericgerlach.com/moderneuropeanphilosophy2/
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